Left-Behind: Elderly Parents and Hong Kong Baptist Churches

Since the announcement of the Hong Kong British National (Overseas) (BN[O]) visa in July 2020, many young Hong Kong families, aiming for different lifestyles, education, and opportunities, have moved to Britain. According to the South China Morning Post, 38,600 Hong Kongers under eighteen years old have applied for BN(O) visas, and those aged twenty-five to fifty-four make up the majority of the 142,000 applicants. By extension, very few Hong Kongers over fifty-four have chosen to migrate to Britain via this route.1 For various reasons, such as language barriers, cultural differences, and lack of community, the elderly parents of these young couples remained. This paper explores the following questions: How do left-behind elderly parents experience and deal with the loss of their children migrating without them? How do they, and their children living abroad, manage split families? How do social organisations, such as churches, provide support for these parents?
According to Hong Kong Christian Service’s survey of older adults in Hong Kong between November 2022 and February 2023, 36 percent had adult children who migrated since 2020. For those who had adult children who migrated, 60 percent of their migrated adult children were their main caregivers prior to the migration. Since this migration, 79.5 percent of these older adults feel an increased sense of loneliness and depression due to their children migrating. On 29 July 2023, the Samaritan Befrienders Hong Kong released a statistical report on suicide deaths in Hong Kong in 2022. Of 1,010 suicide deaths, 466 were sixty years old or above, making up 44 percent of overall suicides, which is the highest on record since 1973. Older adult suicide rates have increased by over 40 percent in the past five years. Agency head of the Samaritan Befrienders Hong Kong, Clarence Chin-kwok Tsang, argues that younger couples’ migration has left many elderly parents living alone, increasing their feelings of loneliness, and since older adults in Hong Kong tend to be more conservative, they are less likely to share suicidal thoughts with others. Society for Community Organisation, Elderly Rights League (Hong Kong), and the Chinese University of Hong Kong together conducted an investigation of working-class older adults between July 2022 and January 2023, finding that only 15.1 percent of elderly parents are in constant communication with their adult children, and only 8 percent of elderly parents consider their adult children as providing constant emotional support.
This group may be vulnerable or traumatised by the relatively sudden decision of their adult children to migrate to Britain. Hong Kong has an increasingly ageing population. As such, physical and mental health issues will have significant costs to the government and society. The outmigration of hundreds of thousands of middle-aged couples has added pressure to Hong Kong’s ageing population and aggravated its demographic challenges. This paper also discusses how faith-based voluntary organisations are tackling the demands of this vulnerable group on social services and other support, and the limits of existing arrangements. By understanding the role Baptist church communities can play in this arena, this paper can inform us on how these organisations can contribute to reducing such societal costs. This timely research allows an understanding of how left-behind elderly parents experience the loss of their adult children migrating to Britain, and how their Christian faith and Baptist church communities can support them in the midst of such change.
This research additionally sheds new light on the theologies of older Hong Kong lay Christians, which have traditionally been understudied. By employing an ethnographic method through on-site fieldwork augmented with semi-structured interviews, this paper provides a timely and in-depth analysis of these questions that allows us to better understand how left-behind elderly parents live their lives.